Dealing With Occasional Anxiety in Children

Anxiety in children can be a real headache for the parents because children apparently don’t stop being the anxious even if the parents try hard to contain the situation. Well, the problem sometimes lies in the method which needs to be corrected. Many parents do not apply right methods in order to deal with the anxiety in children.

So, what needs to be done? Let’s discuss briefly.

Eliminating anxiety is not the solution

An unhappy child is definitely not the individual that parents would want to look at. But, eliminating the factors that trigger stress and anxiety in the children is definitely not the right solution to go for. If a child is prone to have anxious moments, he/she should have the ability to manage that anxiety in the better way. This is one of the biggest problem solving requirements which need to be fulfilled if you want your child to be vibrant and resilient in the entire life.

Avoiding things would not help

Just because your child gets anxious due to certain actions by you, it doesn’t mean that you should start avoiding those actions in order to prevent anxiety from hitting your child’s mind. For instance, if your child faces an uncomfortable situation, talking in a manipulative way to reduce the stress is not going to help the kid. Next time when the kid would be in a similar situation, he/she would like to get a refuge of the same kind. So, you can rather defuse the tension by saying to the kid, “you are going to be okay in the game”, or you can say, “You are just going to do well in the big test”.

Set expectations but be realistic

While you are trying to make your kid as calmer as possible, denying the possibility of failure is only going to build extra pressure on the kid. For instance, you cannot say to the kid that his fears are not real. You have got to respect the feelings of your kid by considering the fact that his fears are genuine. But you can say such words which would give hope to your child to get over the feelings and go in the field with high esteem. Saying ‘your fears are not real’ or ‘you are afraid for something which doesn’t even exist’ may make the child infuriated.

Avoid asking leading questions

Instead of asking questions which would make the child answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’, you can rather ask the questions which would help your child to express things in detail. For instance, asking “Are you anxious about the big test?” would not make the child developing some confidence to share things with you. Instead, you can ask “How are you feeling about the big test?”